Professional burnout and workload of doctors

The purpose of the research was to establish the relationship patterns of acute and chronic (professional burnout, PV) fatigue of doctors with the workload that was characterized by a combination of the length of the working week and the intensity of the labor process. The study involved 325 women doctors. A special questionnaire was used to identify the symptoms of acute and chronic fatigue, duration and intensity of work, to assess the professional and non-professional causes of usual fatigue at work. It was found that the average workload of doctors was 44.9 hours per week, taking into account the physiological intensity of labor — 50.3 normalized hours (NH). The frequency of most of the symptoms of PV increases by 2–3 times at NH > 58 hours, compared with the load at NH < 42 hours. In case NH > 47 hours on a daily fatigue doctors are largely influenced by the factors: work in evening and night shifts; the imbalance of effort and reward; the uncertainty of the obligations; extra-working load; lack of free time. The daily fatigue of doctors is also significantly affected by their individual characteristics — health and anxiety type of behavior.